Late Nights

Despite the eyebag under Airi’s eyes, they were a symbol of all her late nights working on something great or doing overtime at work. Her quaint apartment sounds with a muffled tv in the background and the scribbling of her notes. 

It's been a long time since she had sat down to write new songs since work had swallowed her whole lately, chewing up her hours and spitting out nothing but exhaustion. Every time she thought about writing, her mind offered her nothing but tax spreadsheets and corporate catchphrases.

Tonight, though, she was determined to try. The small TV in the corner murmured softly, adding a kind of background comfort to the otherwise still apartment. A rerun of some cooking show played, the hosts laughing as they flambéed something that looked aggressively flammable. The sound blended into the room’s ambience to the hiss of her old air conditioner, the hum of the never sleeping city outside.

The lights were low, just the soft glow of the TV, her flower-shaped wall lamps, a string of fairy lights drooping lazily above her desk, and the faint orange light seeping out from her oven, where something half-forgotten was probably burning.

Airi hunched over her notebook, tapping her pencil against the page. Her handwriting was a chaotic mix of neat kanji and half-erased English phrases. Scribbled lyrics lined the margins, arrows pointing to nowhere, a doodle of a cat wearing headphones tucked between stanzas.

She hummed a line softly under her breath, frowned, then erased it. The eraser left a faint pink smudge, joining the dozens of others that littered the page.

“Ugh,” she muttered, slumping back in her chair. “Inspiration, where are you? You were supposed to show up two coffees ago.”

Her apartment didn’t answer. She glanced at the notebook again. Words stared back at her from half-thoughts, lyrical skeletons. Nothing good. Nothing that sounded like her. It was hard to write songs about hope and passion when your soul was currently being held hostage by a gray cubicle and a passive-aggressive boss named Mr. Sato. Maybe that was why her words felt flat. She didn’t have anything alive to pull from lately.

She sighed, dragging her hand down her face. “This is pointless.”

And then, something brushed against her leg. Airi blinked, glancing down to see a small black shape winding around her ankle. Two green eyes blinked up at her in the dim light, glowing faintly like twin marbles.

“Hello, Neko,” she murmured, smiling despite herself.

The cat meowed then hopped gracefully onto her lap, curling into a small, purring loaf. Her fur gleamed dark against Airi’s pale pajamas, and she started kneading the fabric like she was making invisible bread.

“Are you hungry?” Airi asked, reaching down to scratch behind her ear. “Or are you just here to supervise my creative meltdown again?”

Neko blinked slowly, and that was as much of an answer as Airi was going to get.

“You know,” she continued, voice softer now, “I tried to give you a fancy name when I adopted you. Something elegant like... ‘Mochi’ or ‘Luna.’ But no, you only responded to ‘Neko.’ You really went with the default setting, huh?”

Neko flicked her tail in response, unimpressed.

“Alright, alright, I’ll stop judging your life choices. Do you want to hear my new lyrics?”

The cat blinked again.

“I’ll take that as a yes,” Airi said, flipping to a fresh page.

She picked up her pencil, tapping the eraser against the notebook thoughtfully. Words hovered in her mind like fragile bubbles of melancholy, fleeting, half-formed. She scribbled something down:

“Under quiet lights, I hum to the dark,
Hoping someone out there can still hear the spark.”

She stared at it for a long moment, then smiled faintly. “Okay, maybe not total garbage.”

Neko yawned in reply, stretching out across her lap.

Airi laughed under her breath, the sound light and warm. “Yeah, yeah. I know. You’ve heard better.”

Airi didn’t think writing a song could feel this impossible. The pencil felt too heavy in her hand. The page too white, too expectant, like it was mocking her with its emptiness. She tried again anyway. She took a deep breath, looked at the words she’d written earlier, and began to sing softly.

“Under quiet lights, I hum to the dark…” Her voice cracked halfway through the second line. She winced, clearing her throat and trying again. It cracked worse.

“Come on,” she muttered, smacking her chest lightly like her lungs had just forgotten their function. “You can do this. It’s just a song. You’ve done this a hundred times before.”

But it wasn’t just a song. And apparently, she couldn’t do this anymore. Her voice sounded thin, hollow, like the melody didn’t want her. Every word came out strained, empty of the emotion she used to pour so easily into her music. It was as if someone had quietly switched out her passion for static while she wasn’t looking. Airi tried to push through it, forcing the notes, forcing the feeling, until the frustration built up behind her ribs like heat—

“Ugh!”

She slammed the notebook shut and threw it across the room. It hit the couch with a slap and landed face-down on the carpet. She sat there, breathing hard, glaring at nothing.

“What is wrong with me?” she whispered.

The room didn’t answer. The TV was off now. Even the hum of the city outside seemed distant. She pressed her palms into her face, groaning. “Why can’t I write anymore? What’s wrong with me?”

For years, music had been her lifeline. Her way to feel alive. She’d already accepted that she’d never be one of those glossy, perfectly styled idols on the big stage, but losing the ability to create this was worse. It felt like she was losing herself.

Airi peeked through her fingers to see Neko perched on the table, her green eyes blinking up at her, tail flicking lazily.

Airi reached out, scratching behind her ears. “Sorry, did I scare you?”

Neko answered by rubbing her cheek against Airi’s hand, purring quietly.

“Yeah, yeah,” Airi said, smiling weakly. “I appreciate the hug.”

She let the cat comfort her for a bit, until Neko decided that lying down was more important than emotional support. As the cat turned, her head bumped into a stack of books lined up against the back of Airi’s desk. The entire row wobbled then collapsed like a domino chain with books and papers scattered across the floor.

Airi sighed. “Perfect. Just perfect.”

She slid off her chair, kneeling to start stacking them again. Her fingers brushed dust off the spines, muttering under her breath about clumsy cats and bad days.And then, tucked beneath a fallen notebook, she saw something she hadn’t seen in years. A dusty yellow, worn notebook with the corners curling. Stickers of flowers, stars, and faded washi tape barely clinging to the cover. Scrawled across the front in bright pink marker were the words:

Airi’s Songs.

She picked it up carefully, brushing off the dust. The smell of old paper hit her, warm and faintly nostalgic. She sat back down, flipping through the pages. The handwriting was younger, loopier, more hopeful. Lyrics filled every page with unfinished verses, crossed-out bridges, snippets of melodies that never went anywhere.

She smiled a little. “Wow… I really thought I was gonna be someone back then.” Her fingers paused on one particular page. Near the bottom, in red ink, were the words:

Dispose of this.

Airi frowned. “Huh? Why did I write that?”

The song beneath it looked familiar. The title was smudged out, but the opening line jumped out at her reading the first sentence of the song.

I just wanna dance with you until the sun come up

Curiosity further prickled so she grabbed her laptop, typed the first line into the search bar, and hit enter. It took less than a second for the results to pop up, then her heart stumbled. At the top of the search results:

Ren Ichijō – Dance with you (Official Music Video)

Her stomach flipped. No. It couldn’t be. Her hand trembled slightly as she clicked the link. The video loaded: Ren standing under stage lights, the same smooth, effortless voice wrapping around words that she knew.

Those are her words.

Every line. Every chorus. Every metaphor she’d written years ago in this very notebook. The same song, now backed by a full arrangement, lighting, and thousands of screaming fans in the comments below.

Airi stared, unblinking, as the music video played—flashy but strangely plain, the kind of overproduced aesthetic that idols loved. Ren’s expression was playful and flirty—her lyrics—flowed like they had always belonged to him.

The final line echoed softly from her laptop speakers:

And in the quiet, I hear her still.

Airi shut the lid slowly, her pulse thundering in her ears. For a long time, she just sat there in the dim light, staring at the closed laptop as if it might explain itself. Neko meowed from the desk, stretching languidly, utterly unconcerned that the world might have just tilted sideways. Airi groaned as the realization hit her like a delayed punch to the gut.

Her mind scrambled through the dusty shelves of her memory until it landed on the one she wished she could burn: the day she’d sold her lyrics. She had been a broke, tired, and desperate teenager. Her mother’s medical bills were piling up, her part-time job barely covered textbooks, and she’d convinced herself that she didn’t need those songs anyway.

So she had sold her precious song lyrics to a shady talent agency online and promised a few thousand yen for “original lyric submissions,” so she jumped at it with no questions asked. No contracts read. Just her words traded for pocket change and enough to pay her family's bills.

And now, years later, here she was staring at a famous idol singing her lyrics on national TV.

Airi let out a shaky laugh, rubbing her temples. “Fates, if this is a joke, it’s not funny.”

But then again… maybe it wasn’t a joke because the one thing about fate? It never accidentally trips you, it pushes you where you’re meant to go. The karaoke night. The duet. The lyrics. The way their voices had fit together like puzzle pieces made years apart. It couldn’t all be a coincidence.

Her pulse quickened. Maybe this was her sign. Maybe this was her second chance to stop being “Airi from Accounting” and finally become the Airi she used to dream about: the one who lived through music, not paperwork. She leaned forward, determination sparking behind her tired eyes. “Alright, universe. I see you. I’ll bite.”

Without thinking too much about it because thinking usually led to chickening out, she grabbed her laptop and typed in the name of that old company. She half-expected the website to have vanished years ago, but it was still there, the same tacky interface and stock photos of smiling musicians pretending to write lyrics.

Airi hovered over the Contact Us button for a long moment before her fingers moved on their own. Her message was simple:

Hello, this is Airi Komatsu. I previously sold some lyrics through your agency to Ren Ichijō several years ago. I’m interested in working with you again as a songwriter.

She hit send before she could overthink it. Neko, now curled beside her laptop, purred softly, her green eyes half-lidded in approval. Airi smiled, stroking her head. “I don’t know, Neko… but I have a feeling things are about to change around here.”

Airi looked at the faint glow of the screen, the sent message still open. For the first time in years, her chest felt light. Maybe fate was messy. Maybe it was late. But it had finally come knocking.

And this time, she was ready to answer.